


The Good News Is, You Don't Have Rabies

by apiphile



Series: Peeniverse [4]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Bad Jokes, M/M, Pathetic fallacy, Watersports, douchebag minor characters, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-07
Updated: 2010-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through Russia and beyond; things begin to fall apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good News Is, You Don't Have Rabies

The main thing about Russia, Bob's discovering, is that it is very, very _big_. Russia spreads out in every direction and as soon as they get on a plane and he thinks maybe it'll only be a few more hours until they can sit on something that doesn't have an engine in it… then it turns out the plane is possibly made of out chicken coops and it'll be safer driving and they're back on the bus, and Bob thinks it is possible he's going insane. If he looks out of the window and sees another abandoned village covered in thorns like something out of a fairytale he is going to snap and start thinking they're in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. It's only a matter of time.

The crew and techs are a wavering lifeline to sanity, but they're no match for Mikey _sans_ Twitter; every inane, weird, worrying thought that pops into his hairspray-poisoned head now gets an audience from whomever is unlucky enough to be standing beside him, instead of however many millions of people are stalking his feed instead.

The other thing about Russia is that it's fucking cold. This is not normally a problem for Bob, being a man constructed from Viking genes for the sole purpose of pillaging and stealing people's towels (if Ray is to be believed on the subject), but the cold is continual, pervasive, and persists even onstage. Apparently Russia does not believe in central heating.

The worst thing about Russia, though, is that Frank's not talking to him, and he's Not Talking To Him really fucking persistently.

* * *

"Congratulations," Gerard says, dumping an orange tub in front of Frank's hands. "Now everyone thinks I'm a fucking junkie."

Frank swallows two pills dry and grimaces. "They already thought you were a fucking junkie. No one ever buys that High On Life bullshit."

"I _am_ high on life."

"And Zoloft," Mikey says, waving his phone around above his head, his chin tipped back so he can keep an eye on the screen and catch the very first glimmerings of a signal the minute it appears. Judging by his grim expression – grim for Mikey's habitually blank features, at any rate – there hasn't been anything that resembles a connection for quite a while. Bob checks his own phone; nope. Mikey is shit out of luck.

"Good luck convincing anyone of that," Ray mumbles from under a blanket. He may or may not be responding to anything that's been said. He's starting to look kinda sick, and Bob's worried this is going to lead to some sort of Russian hospital-related adventure. There have been too many hospital adventures recently and most of them have been Frank's fault.

"Thrash less, less painkillers," Gerard advises, still grimacing at Frank. "Or you can go home."

"No I can't," Frank says stubbornly, stretching back over the sofa and crossing his legs. "You need me."

"We need you in one piece and alive, not spaced out on Vicodin," Gerard swears under his breath and pushes Frank bodily along the sofa until there's room for him to sit down. "You're going to fuck yourself up permanently."

"Don't care."

"I'd noticed."

Bob, watching all this from his not-brilliant hiding place of standing slightly out of Frank's line of sight in the bunks, kind of wants to interrupt. Possibly smack Frank upside the head or turn him upside-down and yell at him to stop being a jerk, but he can't, because it's _his fault_.

He leans against the top bunk – Frank's, by the smell and location – and breathes out as Gerard and Frank continue trading monosyllables at the kind of pitch he's more used to hearing from fights between Gee and _Mikey_.

Ray mumbles something cranky and incoherent and there's a flap of blanket; Bob knows if he goes in there Frank will clam up and leave. That, that is how he knows it's his fault. Because there is no fucking _sensible_ explanation for why Frank has turned into a giant pissy princess and the silences, the absence of his usual spitting and struggling and antagonism, are the only clue who is to "blame".

"Bob," Mikey calls from the lounge, and Frank's head snaps round abruptly. "Bob, Bob, Bob, come and make there be a signal on this, you did it last time."

Bob wonders if perhaps by not answering and not moving, Mikey can be convinced he's not there, and Frank won't turn into a prickly deaf-mute and Bob can go on … eavesdropping like a total dick. Yeah.

"Boooooob," Mikey says in a louder voice. "I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE I CAN SEE YOUR ELBOW."

Well _fuck_.

* * *

Bob can't pronounce the name of the town they play in this time, and his abiding impression of it as a place is that everyone apart from their very very vocal fans is not at all pleased to see them, and also that there are quite a lot of prostitutes.

There aren't any hotels Brian trusts the look of when they actually arrive (too many prostitutes, a sentence Bob's not previously heard anyone utter without actually being euphemistic about the industry) and so Bob rather irritably finds himself sleeping in his post-show sweat and aches on a bunk, back in the bus.

"Frank—" Brian passes a box covered in Cyrillic script to him; a sniff and a tear of cardboard later it's revealed to be chocolate. The fans have lined up, patient as prisoners of war and freakishly _just as silent_, to put their gifts into the boxes Brian brought for that very purpose. Watching out of the bus window Bob was slightly freaked out by this zombie-ish devotion, but he guesses this far out into the middle of Russia, kids don't get to see many shows.

Wind snarls around the bus windows like a string of curse words; Frank passes the box silently sideways to Mikey and folds his arms.

"Mikey…" Brian deposits a hand-stitched rabbit with X's for eyes into Mikey's lap, dislodging the chocolates onto the floor.

"He's cute," Mikey observes, brushing smashed chocolate-dust off his legs.

"She," Bob corrects before he can stop himself. The rabbit is made of pink, star-speckled curtain fabric with a tiny netting tutu. It's a good bet that the rabbit is meant to be female, and that the maker of it is destined to be committed.

Mikey radars the rabbit's ears around like it's trying to pick up TV signal. "Just because he's wearing a dress doesn't mean he's a girl. Am I right, Gee?"

Bob concedes defeat. "It's _your_ bunny, I guess."

Brian hands Gerard a black mug with his own face badly printed onto it without a word. Gerard holds the mug up next to his face and adopts a similarly mangled expression; there's an abrupt snort, and Bob looks back at Frank just in time to catch him fighting to hold back an inexorable smile.

Good, Bob thinks, relaxing a little. He can't possibly sulk for-fucking-ever. He has to at least someday tell Bob what the fuck it is that he's _done_.

Ray finds himself the proud possessor or the confused and slightly snot-riddled possessor – of three identical hand-knitted beanies with the letters R, A, and Y in red, yellow, and blue stitched into them. He spreads them over the table. "Do they think I've got three heads or what?"

"Maybe they think you're a pirate," Mikey suggests, rearranging the hats to spell YAR, the bunny crushed up against his stomach.

Gerard says, "He can't be a pirate, he's the Ninja of Rock."

"What?" Ray rubs his face and sinks back into the blanket. The blanket smells quite strongly of Sick Ray now, which is not a pleasant smell but it's not like the guy can help it. "I'm having my ass repeatedly kicked by Russian germs. I'm a fucking shitty ninja."

Brian's pager beeps loudly into the amused pause that follows. Mikey's head whips round like a striking cobra and in an instant his hand is in his pocket, fumbling madly for his phone.

"You guys are going to have to fight it out over the rest," Brian says, peering at the little screen. He waves it at them as if any of them can see what it says. "SuperSchechter has to go and rescue your tour from disaster again –" and without further explanation he bounds out of the bus, letting in an aggressive gust of cold wind as he goes.

"Bob?" Gerard suggests.

Bob cranes his neck to peer at the contents of the box. He can't get any closer; the box is in what he's coming to recognise as Frank's Sulk Radius, and if he gets that near then Frank'll up and breeze past without saying anything like some teenage fucking prima donna.; no swearing, no shoving, no nothing. Just ignoring him. It's a tactic Bob's still freaked out by; the usual Iero approach to feuding is to be as vocal and assy about it as possible until someone starts a fucking fight and then _he_ has to wade in to stop Frank getting his fucking ass kicked.

This, this pouty monosyllabic…ness and huffiness and folded arms and no eye contact shit, this is much more a Mikeyway-kind of sulk.

Bob wonders if, maybe, he should ask Mikey what to do about it.

He frowns over at Mikey, who is now standing on the sofa waving his phone around like he's looking for water with a diving rod, muttering, "C'mon you asshole asshole asshole," at radio waves or something, and still has the pink bunny clutched in one hand.

Maybe he shouldn’t ask Mikey.

* * *

The village is, Bob firmly believes, not a real place. It is some sort of … horrible remnant of a zombie movie filmed out here in the eighties. Bob believes this because there's no sane explanation for something this fucking creepy existing otherwise; people do not deliberately build homes to look that much like they're occupied by ghostly tormented souls.

And the photographer – who either doesn't speak English or doesn't feel like doing so today – knows it. The interpreter knows it, even if he's keeping it to himself behind the occasional phlegmatic snigger. The make-up woman, who looks about twelve but has the gravelly voice of an eighty-a-day smoker and who really isn't making this experience any less _weird_ and … surreal and dreamlike and freak-show and all the other words that Gee uses while waving his hands around when he means "awesome" and no one but Mikey can understand _why_.

The make-up woman clearly knows that this is not, in fact, a desert village collapsed in the "economic tidal change" (where the magazines in the bus come from Bob has no idea, but head reads them in the absence of anything else to do, and sometimes the words stick).

She probably brought them here so they'd be eaten by zombies or werewolves or something else Gerard has posters of on the wall next to his bunk. She's probably in collusion with them. Working on commission. Free mobile phone for every three musicians devoured by monsters from beyond the grave; Bob's sense of unreality isn't exactly helped by Mikey muttering, two feet in front of him:

"No signal here, no signal _here_, no signal _here_. I think vampire bats ate all the signal."

Gerard, resplendent in a fine mist of fake blood, his eyes given staring depth by god knows how much and how many different shades of eye-shadow, raises his drying nails as he does Spooky Hands. "They flew out of the old school building and sucked your phone dry."

Mikey gives him one of his finest blank faces and points his phone at his older brother. "I was going to tell Petey and Gabe about the spider in the bus. Pete thinks he has the mono … mono … mono …"

"Monopoly," Gerard turns his nails into pinchers and delicately removes a hair from his teeth, smudging nothing.

"… isn't that a board game?"

"It's also a board game. Pete thinks he has the monopoly on what?"

Bob burrows deeper into his coat. It's fucking cold out here. The broken, miserable-looking fir trees and the hollow-cheeked remains of houses that look like movie flats don't do a lot to cut down on the aggressive gusts of arctic wind, and he's pulled a duffel coat on over his hoodie in defiance of the fact that when the cameras are set up he's going to have to take both off and stand around in a shirt looking bewitched.

As long as "bewitched" and "freezing my fucking testicles off" are the same facial expression, Bob thinks he'll do an excellent job.

"Brr," Ray says in his ear. Bob doesn't even jump, just sort of _leans_ towards Ray in an attempt to steal some of his body heat. He remembers too late that Ray is currently an infectious, limp-haired mound of Russian cold germs and woe, wrapped in a blanket and bunged-up to the point of bleariness, but leans anyhow. "Brr rrr rrrr. Why can't we sit on the bus while they're setting up? Brr."

Bob shrugs. "Ask Gerard. Ask Brian."

"Ask someone who knows what's happening?" Ray suggests, "I would but no one does."

"They've brought us out here to eat us," Mikey says, stepping back into the conversation and voicing Bob's thoughts with eerie clarity. He has two coats on and two scarves and looks like a stick-insect rolled in a comforter. "That's what's happening."

There's a clang from where the reflectors are being set up, and all three wince in perfect time. "I should," Bob points at the vague direction of the noise, some as-yet irreversible I Am Crew Not Cast mindset dragging him over to Be Useful. Ray snatches at his sleeve with one gloved hand.

"Shouldn't. Your job is to be my windbreak. _Brrr_," he says, pointedly.

"Where's –" Bob begins. He knows the end of the sentence won't make him feel any better, but he can't see Frank it's bothering him.

Fortunately several years on the road do occasionally lend themselves to moments of mind-reading.

"—Frank?" Ray sounds like he's in desperate need of a tissue. Bob starts rooting around in his pockets under the perfect knowledge that he doesn't have any. "He's – fuck – in make-_shoo_-make-_fntth_-make-_awhoof_-make – I am so fucking tired of this cold – he's in –"

"The other scary make-up twin is putting blood on Frank's face," Mikey says almost brightly.

Bob's stomach does something complicated at the words "blood" and "face" even though he's fully aware that corn starch and food dye are not the same thing as an injury, don't taste the same as Frank's actual blood – Bob bites the inside of his mouth. The fact that he even knows what … pretty much _all_ of Frank's bodily fluids taste like is not something he should be dwelling on.

A crow spirals out of nowhere – Bob guesses the top of one of the taller houses, the skeletal tree-heads, maybe – and bounces onto the ground. One or two of the crew members, American as well as Russian, cross themselves, and Mikey takes a trio of hasty steps back.

"It's just a bird," Ray puts his chin on Mikey's shoulder, pinning him abruptly in place.

The crow – or possibly raven, it's pretty damn big and Bob doesn't really want to own up to his bird-watching phase any more because, well, part of him still thinks it's going to lead to swirlies and beatings – proceeds to undermine Ray's assurance by bouncing onto its back and flapping and jumping like it's being electrocuted.

They take several steps back as one unit.

The crow – or raven – writhes and flaps and croaks and caws angrily for a few more seconds, the flutters becoming weaker and the sounds dying away until it lies motionless and slightly stiff on the stony ground.

"Oh my Jesus Christ that is not a good sign," Gerard says, joining them.

"Haah," Frank's voice rings out like a crack in the air tension. "Hahaa, your faces."

"_Your_ face," Ray points out. Frank, stepping over discarded bags of equipment, is covered in five bright splashes of almost-pink fake blood and looks like he's just walked into Wolverine.

There's a chaotic flap from the ground, and the crow takes off, circles once, and lands on the shoulder of one of the lighting guys; an anaemic, frail-looking blonde guy about Bob's height wearing a grey trucker cap slightly off-centre, who waves almost shyly at them and half-smiles as he points at his bird.

"It's trained to do that," Frank's grin is entirely aimed at Gerard, like a very narrow torch-beam. He sounds almost excited, which makes a fucking change from the sullenness he's been exhibiting like a, like a, like a sideshow guy at the circus of motherfuckers. "He, uh, hires it to movie crews and stuff, it was in one of those vampire movies. Famous crow!" He shifts awkwardly, spasmodically, and presses his hand to his side. Bob winces and pulls his scarf over his own mouth so he can't say anything dumb about Frank settling down and not fucking up his fucking ribs again.

Gerard looks impressed. Mikey's already beaming at the guy, "Can he teach me how to teach Bunny to do that?"

"Uh," Gerard pokes his brother in the arm, "maybe he didn't necessarily use the most … humane … method to teach that bird that trick, Mikey."

"Oh." Mikey turns away from the lighting guy with a slightly sour expression.

"Uh-huh, Gerard, I traded the last of the Vicodin with him to get him to do that—" Frank looks uncomfortable, which may have something to do with the biting cold as much as it does with the way he's standing, favouring one side.

"Well that was fucking dumb, I can't get you more out here, it was hard enough the first time," Gerard rolls his eyes.

"No, I meant –" Frank looks over his shoulder and just for a second catches Bob's eye before jerking his head away; Bob decides that the shadows cast by the weird deserted houses would be a better place for him to look, so he only _hears_ what Frank says next, and doesn't see how sincere he is or isn't; "I meant I don't think I should take any more."

"But it's still hurting you."

"Doesn't matter."

* * *

"Magic," Ray says, squinting out of the window at the impossibly beautiful blue-and-white mountains unfolding beyond a sea of scrubland to their left.

"Wizard done it," Gerard replies, and they both laugh, and Mikey, a second later, catches up with the conversation from around the sides of his phone and adds his own hiccup to the chorus.

Bob looks at his fingernails. He's started biting them again, a habit he gave up in junior high because, honest to god, if everyone _else_ he knew was so keen on making him suffer there was no reason why _he_ should be gnawing his fingers to the quick too; a slightly overweight, fair-skinned, quiet-to-the-point-of-mutism child, Bob had pretty much had "Bully me hard" stamped on this face the second he walked in puberty's mocking embrace.

Mikey waves an immaculately-painted and unbitten nail at something out of the window, something sky-height, and says, "Science."

"Evolved from dinosaurs," Ray says, brushing sweat-dampened, sickness-sweated hair from his forehead.

"But what _kind_ of dinosaurs?" Gerard presses.

They're playing Magic, Science, Bullshit. It's a Ray, Mikey and Gerard game that they've apparently been playing since the dawn of their friendship, and Bob has yet to figure out what the fuck the rules are, what the purpose of the game is, and if either things actually exist or if it's just an excuse for Ray to be as random and weird as his two best buddies for a change.

It used to be – Bob goes back to a thorough examination of the red patches where he's unthinkingly nibbled on the tips of his fingers as well as the last wet and splintery remains of his nails – it used to be that whenever they were playing this retarded road game Frank, who understood it about as well as Bob did, would just start pulling ridiculous faces and saying impossibly stupid shit until Bob couldn't breath from laughing. Magic, Science, Bullshit games used to be something he looked forward to, in a sideways kinda way.

Frank's swaying in time with the bus, looking into the mirror – all the lights around it are switched off, which can't help – cussing and cussing under his breath as he tries to get a beard trimmer into conjunction with the right bits of his face. He's not, Bob believes, actually intending to remove the increasingly hill-billy/hobo facial disaster that's competing with his own beard for Metal Mutiny points, just engage in some sort of … facial hair topiary, or at least that's what he was grandly telling Gerard before Bob made the mistake of exhaling and Frank disappeared like the Cheshire fucking Cat again.

He'd offer to help. It can be tricky trying to tame beards on a moving vehicle, and Bob's Make Yourself Useful, Bryar instinct has led to holding plenty of people's elbows on bumpy surfaces and untangling trimmer cords and pointing out missed bits, but this time … this time he's keeping his mouth shut. He should probably also be keeping his attention on something other than Frank's face, but for some reason his eyes won't let themselves be budged.

His mind's pretty keen on winding him up, too.

"Bullshit," Mikey says, somewhat unexpectedly.

It takes a second to figure out he's talking about something out of the window, not Bob.

The buzz of the beard trimmer entwines with the rumble-bang-crunch-rumble-rumble of the bus wheels over what appears to be a road made of an old airstrip. Bob rests his face in his hands; his mind supplies him with _Frank, kneeling in the shower tray, his face distorted with a happy smirk, his inky dirty hands rubbing over his fucking belly, Bob's piss dribbling into his eye and though it stings, though it must sting like a motherfucker, Frank doing nothing to dislodge it, nothing to wipe it away, just sliding his knuckles down over his body to his naked dick_.

"It grew out of the blood of the great SPACE GIANT –" Gerard begins, launching into a very specific stream of bullshit indeed.

"Motherfucking cunt whore bitch-ass cunt—" Frank mutters, his displeasure carrying over, or maybe under the sound of Gerard's Weird-Ass Storytime.

Bob shuffles his hands around his head a little until his fingers are under the edge of his hat, and under his hair, and pressing into his ears. He keeps his eyes shut, faintly aware that he looks fucking dumb like this and hugely certain that he doesn't give a shit.

His mind retaliates by prodding him, _hey remember that time when you were in that hotel outside Denver somewhere and when you got done fucking him so hard that he bit through his lip you kissed the goddamn blood off and then spent like half an hour fretting that you'd done something terrible to the motherfucker and then he went to sleep on your arm and you stayed there all night and got a dead arm because you didn't want to move, remember that?_

Bob thinks _no_ rather weakly.

"OW," Frank shouts, and Bob opens his eyes and jerks his head up immediately.

The indescribable double-somersault in his stomach, his libido and his horrible over-protective idiot streak colliding with each other like morons in a circle pit, nearly knocks some words out of his mouth. Frank has, perhaps predictably, not been entirely successful in shaping his ambitious beard plot to meet his expectations.

"My _nose_," Frank elaborates, as Mikey and Gerard both hoot with laughter and Ray starts coughing and coughing and coughing and laughing and coughing. He gives them the finger; the finger in question is smeared with blood.

Bob remains hypnotised as Frank presses the back of his hand back to his self-inflicted nosebleed. _Kiss it_, his brain murmurs, _lick it off_, his libido shouts, and _shut the hell up both of you_ his common sense begs, _please_.

Nose blood is always that vivid scarlet colour, the reddest of reds, a colour Bob always associated with Frank anyway, and it's currently leaving brown-yellow-red smears over the back of Frank's hand and dribbling down his upper lip every time he takes his hand away. Just getting messier, and messier.

And he can't tear his eyes away.

Frank's gaze catches his and for a moment Bob's spine goes to water and his whole body goes cold and electric. _Say something_. He could get up right now and, and, and pass him the fucking tissues that are sitting there for make-up removal. He could get up right now and smear even longer lines of blood over Frank's cheeks with the balls of his thumbs and hold Frank's stupid face and kiss him, kiss the blood out of his now sadly lop-sided beard. He could. He could.

Whatever it was in Frank's eyes flashes off abruptly and he turns away like he's been stung. "Assholes."

"Aww, Frankie, it's not our fault you shave like an old man," Ray calls after him, but Frank's already disappeared back between the bunks, shaking his head with his hand pressed to his face.

Bob wonders what the metallic taste in his mouth is; only when Mikey says, "Science?" quietly does he realise, pull his index finger out from between his teeth, and examine where he's torn his nail off below the line of his flesh.

* * *

The forest looks like something from a fairytale.

Bob fully expects to see a wolf beckoning to a little girl in a red cloak, or some old woman with a nutcracker nose and chin leering out of the doorway of a house made of gingerbread and decorated with icing, but so far there's nothing out there but some freaky dead-looking trees and Stewart having a sweary British fight with the bus engine.

"Should have got a Russian bus, I told him," Nicholas says. Nicholas is supposed to be showing them the route to the next venue and interpreting for them when they get there; Nicholas smokes cigarettes that smell like road kill, and believes that rock music is the choice of music for homosexuals and 'the spiritually weak', an opinion he has been keen to disseminate, along with CDs of his New Wave solo project which has a name like someone trying to swallow a doornail.

Nicholas, distinctly Slavic-looking and with a permanent air of disdain, refuses to say a word to Ray, wears a scratched and battered but entirely genuine Rolex, and is, Bob has privately decided, probably a fucking vampire. He definitely looks and acts like Anne Rice made him up.

"Russian buses are not so _glamorous_," Nicholas continues, curling his lip, "but you can at least fix them. I told him. You should have got a Russian bus." He sniffs his contempt and clears his throat with a violent rattle. Everyone in this country sounds like they're dying.

"Stewart can't read Russian," Ray points out, poking at a bowl of chicken soup so thin it is almost anorexic without even a flicker of enthusiasm. "All the Russian buses had Russian instructions and stuff."

Nicholas ignores him again.

_Asshole_, Bob thinks. It's possible his vehemence is related to how long they've been sitting in this creepy wood on a deserted road; it might well also be a result of Frank's continuing campaign of cold shouldering him. Or it _could_ just be that Nicholas Brish is an asshole with a chip the size of a sequoia on his shoulder and some not-very-quiet anti-Semitic politics.

"Maybe we'll see a wolf," Mikey says. He's kneeling on the sofa with his face pressed up against the bus window, trying to peer into the undergrowth in the mounting gloom. "Are there wolves here?"

"Yes." Nicholas ventures nothing further.

"Awesome. I hope I see a wolf." Mikey rests his elbows on the back of the sofa and his chin on the back of his hand.

"They eat children and old people," Nicholas says without any indication of whether or not he approves of this wolfish behaviour. "You don't want to meet a murderer."

Actually, what with Mikey being a Way and everything, Bob thinks, he probably does want.

"If you see anything out there, it will be bootleggers," Nicholas continues, his arms folded over his chest. He sits like Mikey in a sulk, only more upright, like he's balancing a goldfish bowl on his head.

"Bootleggers?" Gerard looks confused and Bob feels roughly the same – the idea that people are selling bad CDs out there in those grey, ghostly woods with their dead undergrowth is surreal and insane.

"Bootleggers. People who make bad, cheap vodka in industrial chemical vats, out there." Nicholas looks slightly angry now, and Bob shuffles along the sofa until his leg is pressed against Ray's sleeping bag-clad thigh, just in case he does actually turn out to be a vampire. "People get sick and die from it in months, but no one can afford to buy real vodka."

"Bleak," Frank says, putting down his belt. He's been trying to pop two of the pyramid studs back in after they fell out, but it doesn't look like he's succeeded at all in anything other than scraping his fingers.

Nicholas shrugs and gets to his feet, his arms hanging stiff and awkward by his sides. "This is not America."

Gerard begins humming the Bowie song under his breath, just on the edge of hearing, and Bob's not surprised to hear, from Frank's direction, an answering _sotto voce_ "sha la la la la laaaa".

Nicholas says, "I will see what your driver is doing wrong now," and strides off down the bus, faded black sneakers giving somehow the impression of military riding boots.

Frank makes a horrid face at his departing back. "Dick," he pronounces after the bus door's _shhh-clomp_ed closed again.

"I _do_ hope I see a wolf," Mikey mutters. "If I see a wolf I am so messaging Pete as soon as we get signal again. I bet _he_ never went on tour through a wolf-infested forest."

"I bet if he did, the wolves'd all run away from Andy anyhow," Frank says absently, picking up his belt again. "In case he tried to bond with them."

"I wonder if you could teach a wolf to do tricks?" Mikey muses, still glued to the window. Frank drops the belt and joins him, shoving him along the sofa with a smack of his hips – something in Bob's lower stomach makes a pathetic whine audible only to his imagination, and his throat gets a little tight.

"What kind of tricks would you teach it?" Frank peers into the trees as well, tapping his own biceps with his fingers. "Like … fetch and play dead and shit? Or party tricks?"

Mikey shrugs again. "Maybe I'd teach it to say stuff."

"Uh, wolves can't talk, Mikey." Bob feels he has to point this out because, realistically, Mikey Way does not have the greatest track record with facts in relation to his amazing plans. After one of Pete's longer phone conversations it had take quite a while for the rest of them to convince him that no, just because they are tiny does _not_ mean mosquitoes and mites can hear your thoughts.

Frank casts a brief, sharp look over his shoulder and goes back to scanning the woods again. His t-shirt is bunched up at the back from where he was sitting, pooled in the small of his back just above where the now-beltless line of his pants has come to rest. Bob can see half an inch of tattooed flesh and it's left him abruptly restless.

"I could teach them to make sounds _like_ talking," Mikey points out.

"Like Gee before coffee."

Bob and Ray both choke on unexpected laughter at this; Gerard flips Frank the bird and leaves, shaking his head with a half-smile that says he thought it was pretty fucking funny too.

Bob looks up again at the sound of someone hawking phlegm. It's definitely Frank: Mikey quit spitting indoors last year, Ray doesn't want to risk dislodging all the mucus in the world from his sickly lungs, and anyhow, Bob knows that sound all too well. He almost ducks on reflex, but instead he catches Frank's eye; the look he gets is borderline venomous and painfully intense.

Frank swallows his mouthful and turns back to the window in one short, violent move.

The feeling of being _robbed_ leaves Bob so baffled he puts his face in his hands to see if his brain's come out. He _hates_ Frank spitting. It's disgusting and crude and disease-spreading and disgusting and it makes him feel sick just thinking about it and now apparently Frank _not_ spitting – what he'd been trying for with all those burns and wasted cancer sticks, wasn't it? – feels even worse.

Mikey says meditatively, "Do you think you could teach it not to pee on the rug?"

And Frank says, "I doubt it."

* * *

"Oh … nooooooo."

Bob looks up from his DS and winces in preparation.

"No. I really don't like those words. Are you sure we can't fix—"

This does not sound good. Bob pauses the game and closes his DS to listen better. It's dark outside, and his internal clock thinks it's bedtime. The clock on his phone thinks it's 9pm, but he can't remember if he set it to the right time zone or not. They're travelling east. It's probably later than nine, and he's tired, and the last Red Bull was several towns ago, and yet it's too fucking cold to sleep.

"We're _already_ using all the blankets," Brian's irritable voice drifts down between the bunks like the death knell of peace. "Ray's sick, this is not good enough. No, I can't – don't fucking make that face, _I'm_ not the one who decided to drive a bus that's made of – oh shut up. No, really, shut up."

This sounds even closer to not good. Bob can hear the wind howling around the bus windows like Gerard's more unearthly vocal warm-up exercises and he's already wearing most of his hoodies and the layer of socks nearest his feet is … not nice. Sure, touring means lax hygiene (especially if you're a Way), but socks aren't supposed to crunch. Not that loudly.

Every time he even considers taking them off, though, the cold sneaks a tendril in and whispers about frostbite.

He's not exactly surprised when Brian comes back in looking harassed and bulgy in a padded jacket and ski gloves, and says briskly, "Okay, the bus battery is still a bit fucked up –"

"I didn't say it was fucked up, I said he's knackered and needs to recharge—" calls a British voice from the front.

"Shut up, Stewart, I didn't ask you to tell them." Brian rubs his nose ring with the back of his hand. "—the bus battery. So. We can't run the heaters overnight, so if any of you have any ideas for not dying of hypothermia now might be a good time you, you know. Talk about that."

There is, in direct contravention to this request, a ringing silence.

Bob says, "No, no, no," under his breath in preparation for the suggestion that is almost certainly coming.

Gerard and Mikey exchange a look, and Bob feels his heart sink that little bit lower. Ray says, "I'm just guessing but I think we've got this covered."

"No," Bob repeats.

"Fucking no," Frank adds emphatically, scribbling something on the side of his sneaker in correction fluid.

"Can you at least not call it a–" Bob sighs, stuffing his DS into his side pocket like that will somehow protect his masculinity from the upcoming words.

"I'm going keep calling them slumber parties right until you stop freaking out about it," Gee says with one of his more wicked grins. "You just be glad I don't let Mikey call it."

Mikey smacks him half-heartedly with a glove. "Puppy pile."

"See," Gerard says with exaggerated regret. "See what happens when you don't just let me call it a slumber party, Bob? Frank? Mikey makes it more creepy."

Bob gives the fuck up and starts piling the mattresses, blankets, sleeping bags, pillows, comforters, coats, and pretty much every-fucking-thing else up on the floor of the bus lounge. Ray watches him from the sofa with red-rimmed eyes and stuffy fascination.

"Uh, Bob, you sure you're not part bear or beaver or something?"

"Fuck off."

"You build a miiiiighty fine nest, eh," Gerard says, in what he must fondly believe to be a Canadian accent.

"Fuck off."

Frank, of course, says nothing at all, just pulls his feet up under his thighs and glares into the night beyond the curtains like the howling wind personally insulted his mother.

The pile … nest … collection of covers is barely finished when Ray slides off the sofa and wraps himself in most of them with a look of snot-nosed determination that shaves about thirty years off his age. Bob can't help smiling; something about the way they randomly regress back to what he's always thought of as _his_ internal age, about ten, is charming.

There's a thump as Frank slips onto the floor and misses the cushions. "Ow."

Mikey examines Frank's elbow as Frank writhes under the blankets like a cranky eel. "Is that a cigarette burn?"

"No," Frank grunts, covering it with his hand.

It is a cigarette burn. Bob remembers making that one; not for spitting so much as because Frank had been grinning down the phone wires at someone, someone, someone who turned out to be Jepha, surprise-surprise, and Bob's stomach had twisted into a painful angry knot thinking about them kissing, thinking about them fucking, thinking about Frank's nostrils flaring as Jepha licked his neck. He was furious and horny and jealous and desperate to get his damn hands on Frank's skin, right there and then, words eluding him completely.

Frank seizes a sweater from the sofa and pulls it on, down over his elbow. Bob watches Mikey roll himself in blankets and snuggle up to Ray like a puppy; he doesn't say anything to anyone, even when Gerard pulls him down to floor-level by his pants leg and shoves him into an uncomfortable hug.

He doesn't mention that it's his sweater.

* * *

Russians barely consider beer to be alcohol. This is originally Stewart-the-British-driver's contribution – a wistful remark delivered to Bob's back as he slips off the bus and makes a run for the venue against the head-denting rain, but the observation is almost instantly proven fair.

The venue looks like a concrete bunker with delusions of grandeur and an overdose of scale. It is apparently some kind of Cold War installation and would house the entire 1960s population of the town, providing none of them had a pressing need to move their elbows in the long nuclear winter at all. The interpreter – a woman with dyed-red hair, a double chin and a pleasant if nicotine-stained smile, pauses for breath. "_And_ would you like some … alcoholic drinks on your rider?"

Mikey and Gee immediately shake their heads. Ray, caught in the middle of blowing his tender red nose (the 'Rudolph' gags are wearing old but Stewart and his co-conspirator on the crew, Gay Dave, seem enthralled by them still), says, "There's a crate of beer already isn't there? I can see it." Only because he's still dealing with his nose, it comes out as _I cab dee ib_.

This is relayed to the venue manager, who is about two hundred years old and seem to have put all his energy into growing the most incredible Guy From Monopoly-moustache Bob has ever seen. The manager laughs like he's dying and says something dismissive.

"Children's drink," the interpreter says, succinct and amused. She smoothes her hoodie – a _Three Cheers_-era fake – with her hands and adds, "He says vodka is a man's drink."

Frank, who had to pause and puke by the wire mesh fence before they got inside having spent last night on some kind of suicidal whiskey-consuming mission with Gay Dave, playing a drinking game that involved shouting, "SHITFACED!" a lot, groans pitifully. "Tell him we're little pussy girls then."

"I don't think he needs telling," she says, smirking into her sleeve. Bob would smirk along with her, but he doesn't think that's a good idea at all.

"Where's the bathroom?" Frank asks, a look of sudden panic passing over his face like a cloud, "I have to puke. Real soon."

The interpreter leans back into the windowless corridor and points. Frank dashes away down the echoing concrete veins like the legions of Hell are on his heels and Bob turns his attention to their rider, which consists of two crates of beer, four bottles of probably fucking vodka with no actual labels on them, and two packets of what look like Doritoes-branding but with Cyrillic writing on them.

"Um," he says, feeling the muscles in his forearm twitch as he rescues his hair from the collar of his hoodie, "is there Red Bull?"

"нет." The old man with the yellow-white walrus-type moustache like a cartoon circus ringmaster gone feral adds something else in Russian and beams. His false teeth are all coated with gold.

"He says, there's vodka."

Gee snorts. Ray sniffs. Mikey says, "I'm going to see if Frank's okay, okay?" and shuffles out with his hands in his coat pockets.

"Vodka … isn't Red Bull." Bob tries to contain a yawn. The road here is bumpy and his sleep's been fractured and not at all refreshing. He feels worn and frayed at the edges, like a sock that's been on too long. Much like his socks. "Is there anything _like_ Red Bull?"

The old man's response to this translation makes the interpreter frown. "For legal reasons," she tells them, "I can't tell you what he just offered you."

The venue manager mimes snorting and gives Bob a thumbs-up and another gold-coated grin.

"Cocaine?" Gerard says icily, raising his eyebrows. "No."

"Er, speed," the interpreter admits, glaring at the manager. She looks like she would quite like to smack him in the mouth were he not so old and so frail-seeming.

Bob makes a face. "No."

"Yeah," the interpreter says. "_No_."

The two hours prior to the sound check consist mostly of Brian poking his head in every five minutes to explain that the check's been delayed because someone now can't find an adapter, now the sound desk has bacon rind in it, now the usual technician has called in sick and no one can find the replacement guy, and now it turns out he's the one with the keys to the closet with the spare adapters in it and no one else has any for some fucking reason, and _now_ …

Every time Brian does this Bob jerks awake with a start and realises he's been dozing off.

Two times Frank returns from the bathroom with Mikey in tow, looking sheepish and pukey and hungover, only to grimace and bolt again a minute later.

The door opens again; Brian's apologetic head and Bob's Rise Against hat (at least, he's pretty sure it's his) pokes around the frame again. "We've found Arkady but he's lost his keys," Brian says from between his teeth. "As soon as Mr. Chahine has picked the closet lock we're good to go. Don't ask why he has to pick locks in his own venue. Just don't."

Bob watches from behind almost-closed eyelids as Gee gives him a terse thumbs-up and Frank turns swiftly to retch into a waste-paper bucket. Mikey rubs his back with a look of concern. "Careful you don't, um, pull your rib… muscles … or anything heaving like that," he murmurs.

Frank's gratitude is finger-shaped, but Mikey ignores it.

Ray snores gently on the forbidding sofa, his feet dangling at a weird angle and his hands tucked between his thighs.

Frank looks up from the bucket and wipes stringy drool from his lower lip with the back of his hand; he catches Bob's eye, hostile and brown-bloodshot eyes flashing something hot-tempered in this cold room, but it's the motion and the saliva Bob really notices.

Unfortunately both are stored in a bit of his brain that has quite frequent chats with his pelvis and the association – drool on Frank's lip, the slow removal of bodily fluids by an unsteady hand – fires something groinward and stirs everything up.

Bob shifts uncomfortably on the wooden school chair that's probably older than he is. It's been some time since he … since … since Bob has had quality alone time with himself and also the mood to … to want that alone time. His balls mutter darkly about neglect. Bob shifts again and tries to get his hair out of his eyes without taking his hat off.

Before … before _all this_ started, right before, Bob used to jerk off kind of a lot. Well. A normal amount. Thinking about Frank, usually, thinking about throwing that scrawny hyperactive shit off his back, throwing him on the floor, growling at him to _keep fucking still_, holding his wrists, biting at his lips even as Frank bites at his, turning him over and fucking him, fucking him with his fingernails digging into Frank's shoulders like a reminder.

And then there _was_ piss in bus showers and cigarettes against Frank's skin and the guilty but overwhelming thrill of temporary ownership, of _you are going to do what I say_, leaving slap-marks red and raw on Frank's face, finding weeks later the shy brown scar-stains of cigarettes still winking on his skin. All those giddy, amazing, fucked-up moments.

Right now – Bob closes his eyes wearily – Frank's bitching about his hangover, he's like thirty pounds heavier, he's not climbing on people or spitting on shit or laughing his high and stonerish infectious giggle … but all those weird and wounding feelings are still fucking there.

And Bob still seriously wants to fuck him.

Frank sighs, "I am never drinking again."

Gerard leans over and pats him on the shoulder, the _I'll believe it when I see it_ pat of a man who has heard this several times before and witnessed the shotgunned beers less than a week later each time.

Because Bob is in a room full of people – the interpreter is reading a paperback, leaning on the far wall, her cheek against the concrete – he does not reach down and squeeze his dick through his pants. It feels like that, though. Like his hand's weighing on it right now, like he's going to sit here fucking fidgeting himself to a hard-on no matter how inconvenient it is.

Frank gives a low, pained groan and slumps over his own forearms on the counter that holds the vodka and Gee's make-up, crinkling his fingers deep into his hair. The groan is unfairly familiar and it slaps Bob hot and hard in the already troubled libido; he nearly echoes it.

"Going to," Bob says, coming to a decision but not actually bothering to finish the sentence. He shuffles out into the corridor – it looks like a scene from a post-apocalyptic first person shoot 'em up circa 2005 – and hears the door slam shut behind him before he realises he didn't ask where the bathrooms actually _are_.

No problem. It can't be too hard to find…

…twenty minutes later Bob's convinced he's lost in some kind of sleep-deprivation-induced delirium. He's bone-tired, still faintly horny in spite of everything, honestly needs to piss now as well, and the endless and endlessly-dividing green-tinged concrete corridors offer no sign of any bathrooms. No sign of any signs, either – Bob went to all that trouble learning "туалет" for nothing…

He leans on an unmarked door and falls sideways into what is either a toilet in a closet or a hallucination, and right now he doesn't care which as long as he's allowed to pee in the hallucination.

Bob has just unzipped his fly when Brian's voice, echoing strangely in the billion vein-like corridors, taps on the edge of his consciousness. "Where is he, then? I called drums check five minutes ago."

* * *

"Go in a bottle," Gerard advises, as Mikey peers around the door to the bathroom and shudders. "Go in a bottle. Go in a bottle. C'mon. We did this in the van days. Go in a bottle."

"We also ate deep-fried … I don't know what in the van days," Ray points out blearily, hugging a mug of something warm and lemon-smelling like it's his new best buddy.

"Tell him, Ray," Mikey complains. Gerard is now braced against the opposite wall, trying to bodily shove his little brother through the bathroom door while Mikey clings for dear and desperate life to the doorframe. "GEE STOP IT."

"I'm not telling anyone anything," Ray says firmly. "Bob, get your feet off me."

Frank's curled up on his bunk with headphones in, a porn magazine draped over his face, and the deliberately measured breaths of someone who isn't asleep but is pretending to be in the hopes of fooling himself into actually falling asleep. Bob taught him that trick; he'd be offended that it's being used against him now, but there are more pressing matters.

The draining system on the bus toilets has broken half a day into the long, long drive to the next gig and Bob is becoming aware of a new kind of difficult choice; to stay on the bus, not pee, and possibly die of ammonia poisoning, or to get off the bus, pee, and definitely die of frost creeping up the hole in his dick.

"Go in a fucking bottle," Gerard complains, giving up on shoving Mikey in favour of looking wounded and indignant.

"No peeing in things," Frank mumbles from the bunk, giving the lie to both his breathing and his headphones. "That only ever ends _badly_."

Bob pretends not to hear this. "If you're going to take up the entire sofa," he mumbles, moving his feet off Ray all the same. The fucked up bathroom situation is hitting him in ways he's pretty sure it's not hitting anyone else; the weight of a full bladder is still horribly interlinked with all those mental images he's trying hard to forget, and he's got a couch cushion almost permanently pressed to his crotch, just in case.

"I'm not going with you watching me," Mikey says, deflating. He waves a finger around the bus lounge like he's making a sweep to take out enemy soldiers. "I'm not."

Gerard puts his hands on his head. "No one was asking you to, airhead."

Mikey frowns, barely perceptible to anyone who doesn't know him. "I knew that." He snatches an empty water bottle from the floor and half-stomps down the line of the bunks, as convincing in his sulk as he was in his protest. Ray starts laughing.

"You're all asshoooooooles," Mikey sings over his shoulder in a doleful monotone. "Asshooooles."

"Tinkle tinkle splish splash," Gerard sings back, making it sound almost cute. Bob winces. Way weirdness alert indeed.

"I can't believe you still remember that," Mikey mutters. Bob fidgets his hand around under him. Somewhere, somewhere on this sofa there is a DS – he can't remember whose – and he's vaguely certain that there's some battery left on it. He will play anything right now, anything to take his mind off the fact that he badly needs to pee and Mikey is about to, anything at all. He will play shitty Dr Shitty Thingy's Brain Training if he has to.

There's a brief _spatter-splosh_ which vanishes almost immediately. Ray starts laughing again, his chuckling tinged with a slightly feverish hysteria.

"Um, Geeeee_eee_…"

"Yeee_eeee_s?" Gee mimics Mikey's whine and grins at the ceiling. "What?"

"Can you, um, can you sing something? I can't go with everyone listening."

"No one's listening, Mikey." Gerard's peg-toothed grin looks like someone tried to slice the top of his head off. Something hard and oblong hits Bob's questing fingers from under … under a shirt or something. He really hopes, just this once, that it's not a cigarette case. Why the hell Gerard even owns a cigarette case…

"Please, just _sing something_."

Gerard clears his throat, snickers into his sleeve, and starts singing, "Tinkle tinkle splish splash," with all the soul and enthusiasm of a bus-stop drunk. "Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, thplash—"

"SOMETHING ELSE SOMETHING ELSE," Mikey howls. There is another splosh. "ARGH."

Gerard breaks off and starts giggling. "But you liiiiike that song."

"I liked it _when I was four_, you – you – please just – oh my god I'm going to get pee on my pants I'm going to get pee on my fucking pants."

"So nothing's changed," Ray and Gerard say in staggered unison, and both laugh harder. Bob gets his fingers under the possible-DS and lifts it. It's about the right weight.

"I'm going to throw this fucking bottle of pee over you," Mikey says, somewhere between frustrated and furious.

"NO," Frank snaps from his bunk. There's such an edge in his voice that everyone goes quiet for a second and stares at each other until Bob hastily ducks his head and looks down at the definitely-DS in his hands (it's pink, which means it's also definitely not his) to hide the angry flush traipsing up his jawline on a mission for his forehead. That fucking motherfucker. That fucking, fucking motherfucker.

He has no fucking idea what game Frank's playing but he's had close to enough of it.

Then Gerard shrugs, and starts singing _Somewhere Over The Rainbow_, because he's Gee and he wouldn't be a Way if he weren't aggressively weird out of nowhere with no damn warning. He switches it out with _Run For The Hills_ a little later and carries right on even after Mikey shuffles back in with the bottle wrapped in a towel like a baby.

"I peed on my shoe," Mikey says crossly, by way of explanation as he crosses the lounge, ready to jack open the window and toss the bottle out.

"Don't litter," Bob says automatically. The DS screen is fucking … cracked or whatever the LED equivalent is. Inky. Smushed. Broken. _Fucked._ "Fuck."

"I'll pour this on _you_," Mikey threatens half-heartedly. He doesn't even open the bottle.

Bob looks up from the DS and holds his face still. It's not hard. He and Mikey have been having blank-facing contests for _years_ now, and although Mikey still wins them Bob has learnt a trick or two. "No," he says in his _talking to dogs_ voice.

Mikey sighs and turns on this heel, "I got pee on my shoe, I got pee on my shoe and pee in a bottle and pee on the towel – "

"That's _my fucking towel_," Ray complains, face mostly hidden in his mug.

"—pee on my hands, pee on the carpet, pee on—"

"I will," Gerard says, looking at Ray, "be so fucking happy when we get phone signal again. And then I will stage an intervention. Twitter is bad for him."

"And everyone around him," Ray mutters, slurping whateveritis in the mug with feeling.

Bob gazes down despondently at the DS screen. He really, really hopes it wasn't him who broke it.

"Pee – on my –" Mikey's voice drifts plaintively down the bus.

"STOP SAYING 'PEE'," Frank shouts, and there's the slithery thud of what is almost definitely a porn magazine sliding onto the floor from, say, Frank's face. "STOP SAYING FUCKING PEE."

When Bob looks up Gerard is looking right at him with a _I am not fucking about now_ face on and his hands on the back of his neck. "Bob, seriously."

"What?"

"Whatever the fuck is with you two, fix it."

* * *

Three chairs pushed together in a dressing room is not a bed, but Bob's not in the mood to be choosy. He's stretched out as far as he can, his legs bent at a weird angle so he can rest his feet on the floor, and he's got his hands in his armpits. Sleep is going to happen. Sleep is _going_ to happen. Sleep _is_ going to …

"Hey Bob," Gerard says quietly, and a shadow blots out the buzzing striplight. Bob shades his eyes with his hand and cranks them open slowly. There's crud in the corners. "Hey Bob, I need to talk to you."

This does not sound like the opening to a debate about whether Red Bull counts as a food group, whether Leia or Jabba's Twilek slave is hotter, if the Modal Nodes or the Max Rebo band were the better band, or just a casual question about what pizza topping Bob wants to contribute to the order; it sounds like Gerard Way, Serious Lecture Voice. Bob frowns against his hand.

"Um."

Gee's crouching beside the chairs now, his arm extended over the top of their backs. He looks troubled, in that horribly earnest Someone Has Let Me Down way that makes Bob cringe from the toes up. Bob squints from under his hand.

"Is something wrong?"

This is possibly the most pointless question ever, Bob thinks defensively. _Everything_ is wrong; Russia is shitty cold, Ray is sick, Mikey's going crazy from lack of phone, Frank is sulking and Bob feels like someone is kicking him repeatedly in the chest and he can't sleep properly. _Everything_ is wrong.

"… I don't know?" Bob opts for the safe route. He's not going to get his nap.

"It's just that you've been kind of … I don't want to sound mean, Bob," Gerard signs and rests his chin on his own shoulder, reproachful brown dog-like eyes staring at Bob until Bob wants to sink through the floor and through to the centre of the earth where the guilt may not be able to get him. "But you're not … exactly … giving it a hundred percent at the moment. In the shows."

Bob says nothing. His armpit is scratching and is throat is dry, and he can't do anything about either.

"And they can tell, Bob, the kids." Gerard sounds hideously concerned, horribly honest, and what sucks the most is that he's fucking _right_.

Bob tries not to wince. He doesn't, as a rule, get the short end of Gerard-lectures. He gets the Well Done Bob, the inflection close to _good dog_, he gets Reliable Bryar, he gets … ignored, a lot of the time, but that's preferable to Gerard Way sitting down beside you and flat-out telling you that he's disappointed in you. That you've let him down. That's like being punched in the soul. Or, given that it's Bob's fucking fault, like punching himself in the soul. Shit.

"I don't want to be a dick, I really don't," Gerard sighs, and he reaches down to move some of Bob's hair off his forehead; Bob doesn't stop him. Everything is so shitty. So, so fucking shitty. "But you're dicking them out of what they … they line up for freaking days for this, Bob, some of these places haven't ever had a rock show. These kids waited so long to see us, you know? We should give back what they gave us."

Bob thinks he might suffocate now. He needs to swallow. Or move. Or something. Put his fingers in his ears so he can't hear Gerard telling him that he, Bob Bryar, is fucking everything up. Ruining lives instead of saving them. Breaking Gee's band. The room was already too cold but now he feels like he's lying in a morgue, all he needs is a tag on his toe.

He croaks, "Where's … everyone?"

"I'm here," Ray says from a distant corner. "Mikey and Frank are looking for pizza."

"Seriously," Gee says, sitting back on his heels, "did something –"

"No," Bob turns away from the question, trying to refrain from pushing Gee to one side. "Nothing has happened."

* * *

The problem.

Bob chews on his knuckle. It's not his habit, but habits get passed around like towels, t-shirts, and unfortunately, underwear on tours; he's even found himself, back in the day, trying push a pair of glasses he has never worn back up his nose.

The problem. The sensible thing to do would be to talk to Brian, or – in the interests of not bothering someone currently so busy that he is blurred every time Bob sets eyes on him – to Gerard.

Gerard understands feelings. He's practically on pet-name terms with them. If there's anyone Bob can talk to about _feeeeeelings_, it's Gee, who will happily talk about his own, other people's, the abstract concept of emotions, and the history of emotional expression through visual arts until someone either stuffs something in his mouth or distracts him by claiming that it doesn't matter if Gredo or Han shot first.

The problem _is_.

That whole conversation would actually require Bob to have information he's not sure he actually has, _viz_: how Frank feels.

Or if he's being perfectly honest – Bob tips the electric kettle until the cardboard-y bits of dried noodle float to the surface of the cup, and closes the foil lid back down over the unappetising mess – he'd also have to know how _he_ feels, and the best answer Bob can come up with to that at the moment is "like I'm going to throw up".

This is the most dismal dressing room Bob's been in in some time. One of the sound guys at the venue only has one arm, the other apparently lost to an improperly-managed gunshot wound several years ago; he has demonstrated for Gerard and Frank's endless curiosity how he dumps his prosthetic limb in the path of the sliders and continues to adjust sound levels without a hitch but Bob would be more convinced if he ever saw the gaunt-looking man in the Iron Maiden shirt smile. At all.

Then again, smiles have been in short supply here. Apparently Siberia – as this is the more correct term for where they are now – is not big on wasting energy on smiles.

Bob glances around and cups both his hands around the noodle cup. He's in fucking Siberia, and okay it's summer but there's still two inches of angry-looking snow on the ground outside, smothering the cautious heads of whatever those little yellow flowers are called, and this morning he found a hibernating bee in his hoodie. He's in fucking Siberia wearing four pairs of socks and his wrist won't stop twinging, it's dark all the fucking time, he's about to eat a, a, a, a, whatever the Siberian equivalent of a Ramen cup is, he's got thawing icicles in his beard, and he feels like his fucking heart is breaking.

The Russian Ramen thing falls over and tips scalding water onto Bob's arm – he jumps back and shakes it off, but the pain itself doesn't really register.

Is that what it feels like?

Bob absently casts about for a towel to wipe his arm off with but the concrete bunker full of wooden chairs which is masquerading as a dressing room isn't supplied with things as civilised as towels. There aren't even any paper towels.

"Ow," he mutters under his breath.

"Bob?" Brian's welcome face pokes around the door to the horrible, empty room. "Bob, you're needed for the – are you okay?"

Bob, dripping hot noodle-water from the end of his sleeve and aware that he's not making facial expressions the way they're supposed to happen, stares over his shoulder at Brian for what feels like a small eternity, his eyebrows drawing closer and closer together.

"I don't know."

"Bob?" Brian edges into the room and peers at the water dripping off his arm, and then the kettle. Bob's pretty sure that this expression is confused because he's _Bob_, and not _Mikey_, and therefore upending kettles of boiling water onto his person shouldn't be on the agenda.

"The kettle," Bob explains, although that's not what he means at all. He shakes water off the end of his sleeve; Brian's wearing a leather flight jacket the manager of the venue before last gave him, and a confused expression, and everything's shit.

Everything's shit.

"How the fuck?"

"Everything's shit," Bob mumbles, looking at his shoes. That … wasn't meant to come out of his mouth. "I hate Russia."

Brian frowns. "It's just Vladivostok," he says soothingly, "and then you're on your way to Shanghai." He says it like he's worried Bob might explode. Somewhere in the pit of Bob's shitty churning stomach he accepts that he's being difficult, and that everyone else is probably sick of Russia too, and that there's a good chance that a mostly Twitter-free Mikey has driven everyone including himself utterly fucking crazy; "C'mon, Bob," Brian says, reaching across the enormous, endless gap between them to pat him awkwardly on the arm, "It's only one more gig."

* * *

China is better, although not for the reasons Brian assumes: it's better because Bob can feel his finger tips again, it's better because Mikey has access to texts even if, for some reason, he can't get Twitter, and it's better because Gerard finds a shop selling fake LEGO Deathstars, AT-ATs, and plushie Ewoks the size of dollar coins, and will not stop grinning about it for half a fucking day. Gee's good humour is, as almost always, really fucking infectious.

It cracks as abruptly as a kicked plate when they're waiting in the conference room of their hotel, waiting for someone from either a radio show _or_ a state-run music magazine – Bob can't get anyone to tell him which – and Frank flops listlessly over the table, his borrowed baseball cap pulled down over most of his face and his elbows concealing the rest of it from view. "Fuckers."

Ray flicks something at him. "Are you going to stop yet?"

"Stop what? What?" Frank's shoulders form an ugly barricade.

Mikey, examining a tray of pastries with the intrepid air of curiosity more suited to a man spelunking in a cave full of fucking Smurfs, says, "That." There's a pause. "Oh my fucking god this one has whole walnuts on it. Whole walnuts! They're all sticky, though. That's pretty … what's the word, are they, like … pickled in sugar? What's the – you know, when something's pickled in sugar …"

"Shh," Gerard says, picking at something on the table. "Mikey."

Bob realises he's slipped down over the table until he's almost mirroring Frank's position; he straightens up as much as he can in the face of not enough sleep, and rubs under the rim of his beanie. His beard starts itching, apparently just to inconvenience him.

"What?" Frank repeats, stretching out one arm to jerk the tray of pastries around. "What? What? Stop what? Stop _what_?"

"Jesus, Frank," Mikey mutters, sitting down again and folding his arms over his chest.

"And why me, anyhow?" Frank adds.

"Okay, that's enough," Gerard says, standing up and pointing at the door.

"… what?" Frank sounds almost worried under the defiance. "Seriously, what the fuck?"

"Up," Ray suggests, not moving. He flicks something else at Frank, and Frank – rather surprisingly, gets to his feet. It's possible he only intends to move chairs, but Gerard crowds him like a sheep-dog.

"Out," Gerard says, setting his shoulder against Frank's side and pushing him towards the door. "You. Out. Go. Now. Leave. Walk. Talk. Get. Out."

Frank braces himself against the doorframe and yells in a mixture of indignation and genuine pain, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

Gerard stops pushing and makes threatening, slap-like motions. Everyone knows he's not actually going to smack Frank in the face, everyone knows it's slightly less likely than Frank sprouting the desire to shut up or Bob … magically acquiring the ability to sing in key, but Frank rears back from Gee's hand anyway.

"You. Bob. Outside. Cigarette. Walk. Something. Get out. Do not come back until you have FIXED THIS." Gerard waves a Zippo around in some sort of frustrated interpretative dance designed to communicate just how badly he wants them both gone. Bob tries to turtle into his hoodie but it's no good; Gerard's indignation and impatient bossiness catch sight of him and there's another staccato gunfire of words. "Fucking. Bob. GET. OUT. AND. TALK. TO. EACH. OTHER."

"Whole sentences?" Frank asks, still loitering in the doorway, his facetious asshole face screwed up in something between annoyance and amusement. "Don't we at least get whole sentences?"

"No." Gerard makes like he's going to shove Frank again. "Sentences. Til. You. Fix. Out. Go. Now. Leave. Frank. Out."

"You'd make a shitty relationship counsellor," Frank observes. Apparently what he's just said hits him a second later, and his expression crumples like a squashed plastic cup into one of acute horror. He clamps his hands over his mouth for a second before zombie-ing his arms and marching out of the conference room chanting, "Taaaaaaaalk taaaaaalk taaaaaaalk," and giggling under his breath.

Bob throws Gerard a helpless look which Gee refuses to catch with any kind of sympathy. "Ouuuut."

"But."

"Go."

"But."

"Leave now."

"Gee."

"Listening. Not. Go."

Bob stays where he is. "You've got my lighter."

"…oh yeah." Gerard looks slightly embarrassed, pushes the Zippo into Bob's palm, and gives him a little shove. "Go. Now."

Frank's still in the lobby of the hotel going _Mrawrrrr_ to himself when Bob catches up, and acknowledges him – at last – with a nod and a bounce of his zombie arms. "So Russia blew," he adds, apparently daring Bob to disagree with him as he waves his fingers at the automatic doors.

Security give them a cautious look, but don't even try to follow. Bob guesses they know Personal Conversation when they see it looming on the horizon like a fucking trainwreck, and … just like him … they'd rather not be there when it happens.

The street is a wall of sound after the silence and the vague fountain-kind of noises of the lobby, and the smell is completely different. Two or three people pass in little respirator-type masks, looking preoccupied, and Bob scoots over to let them pass, bumping into Frank.

Frank puts his hand on Bob's back to hold in still.

"Russia didn't blow," Bob says eventually, thinking about it carefully. "I blew."

There's a long silence as they turn onto the next street. A bicycle zips past; Bob figures he doesn't need a cigarette since he seems to be inhaling pure coal dust. He can almost feel his lungs turning black as they walk slowly, slowly towards nothing in particular. Frank's hand is still resting, very lightly, on the place in his back that is neither the small nor the back of his ribs.

Sometimes it's easier if things _do_ have a name, too.

"I think I kind of blew too," Frank says, picking at his lower lip with his other hand. "Probably a lot."

"Or not at all," Bob mumbles.

Frank laughs uneasily, a kind of _you made a dirty joke and I don't know if I feel that dirty_ kind of laugh, which three or four months ago would have come as a shock but now just makes Bob feel even guiltier. It cuts off abruptly. "I still want to."

"Um," Bob says, because all his other words have been squeezed out of him by the sudden hand in his chest. "Um. You do?"

Something that, cultural differences aside, is unmistakeable as a police car goes rattling by, and the entire street goes just a little quiet, sound flooding back into the wake of the vehicle on a time-delay, dragging Bob's thoughts as blundering and pained as a landed fish behind them.

Frank rubs both his hands over his face – there's the start of a second beard prickling up his jowls like a forest under snow – and says very quietly, "Of course I fucking do."

It’s obvious what the next words out of Bob's mouth ought to be, but for a moment he stands still on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed into his hoodie pockets and his eyes almost shut against the smog and the discordant layering of bicycle bells and murmured invitations to buy this or try that or – since Bob knows no Shanghainese or Mandarin or whatever – threats of dismemberment or queries about where Bob gets his damn hoodies, he doesn't know.

Someone carrying three laptop-bags and looking somewhat unhappy about it dodges past them with a curious stare. Some sort of bird – he's not looking up to find out what and he can't remember if he knows any Chinese birds anyhow and he doesn't care, he really doesn't care, he'll … he'll look it up later – makes a sound a little like a coo somewhere above his head, somewhere in the overhead wires.

"Then why—?" he manages, his eyebrows drawing together over his forehead like a child's drawing of the concept of anger. "Why the—?"

"So … just you and me," Frank interrupts, his voice slightly hoarse, his jerky hand-gesture taking in the entire street full of people.

"I guess?"

"You _guess_?"

Bob feels like he's listening to a radio broadcast in a foreign language. "… I don't see anyone else?" He means, no one else from the band, no one else from the crew. The street is packed.

"That was the idea."

Frank grabs him by the back of the neck and pulls so hard Bob nearly loses his balance completely. Before he's regained internal equilibrium, there's a familiar and somewhat hair-edged mouth pushed up against his, and all he can really do is kiss back, forget the conversation and forget his stomach tying itself into some new breed of knot entirely, kiss back and hope.

There's a very loud bicycle bell quite close to. Bob ignores it. His body is two sizes too big for itself and his head is full of air. His hands – he still doesn't know what to do with his fucking hands – twitch and shiver in his hoodie pocket and his mouth is sore but happy, sore but okay, sore but fine again, rough and wet on Frank's lips.

Then, just as Bob's thighs are starting to shake and his chest gets warm and he decides to stop wondering what the fuck's going on and just relax into Frank's mouth, relax into kissing him, holding his shoulders or his face or his hair or _something_, just then, just then…

Frank steps back and jerks his head away from Bob's mouth. He says in a horrible, unFranklike hollow voice, looking at the ground two feet to Bob's left rather than at his face, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea, is it?"

Bob's about to say, _well we are in the middle of the fucking street, Frankie_ and start laughing because truthfully he doesn't care any more, he really doesn't care that they're in the middle of a busy Shanghai street, he's just so fucking _relieved_ that they're not fighting any more he wouldn't care if Frank took all his clothes off and painted himself blue, but Frank's not done yet.

"I don't think we should do this any more."

Thinking of the number of times his heart's leapt, salmon-like, away from his rational mind, and the wild and unpredictable feelings, and the shame and the hot faces and the way he's travelled from vague possessive controlling jerk-off fantasies to being outright addicted to the smell of his own goddamn fucking piss on Frank's skin, Bob mutters, "Maybe you're right."

In the pause that follows two teenagers on bicycles zip between them, staring, and one of them nearly crashes into the other as they reach the end of the street. Somewhere in the midst of traffic and talking and the murmur of phones Bob can hear the distress of chickens down some side street.

Bob frowns; Frank's still examining the sidewalk. "Um … why?" he adds, aware that something isn't right, but at a loss as to what.

"Why what?" Frank mutters, brushing something away from his face.

"Why don't you think … why shouldn't … why?" Great. English has once again deserted Bob in favour of someone who isn't an idiot and can therefore work out what it is he wants to say before he opens his big stupid idiot fucking mouth. Bob curls his fingers up inside his hoodie sleeves and his toes up inside his sneakers and wishes someone else were here having this conversation instead of him.

"Because it's stupid." Frank lifts his head and fixes Bob with a basilisk stare, the kind of malevolent, soul-crushing stare that a broken coke vending machine might give off on the approach of the ten thousandth drunken quarter-wielding dick who can't read the Out-of-Order sign.

"I liked it." What else is there to say?

Bob liked it a lot. A lot a lot. He's only coming to realise how many different freaking ways he liked _it_ now that _it_ appears to be fast vanishing on the rear horizon.

"You like _stupid_ things," Frank says with the childish ferocity of a ten-year-old and the bitterness of someone four times older. He looks like he's chewing the inside of his mouth and Bob wants to reach out and, and, and _slap_ him until he quits. Until he quits mutilating his cheeks and quits saying things like that.

Bob clenches his fists. There is a third clenched fist in his chest and it feels like it's going to stop him from moving if he doesn't say something. "I like _you_, you fucking asshole." Because when it comes to liking stupid things, Bob knows where he is. He likes stupid fuck things he should have grown out of years ago, like cartoons and reassurance and pretending pizza slices are cigars and pissing on things because they're his. Or he thought they were. Or he wanted them to be. Or he thought they wanted to be. Or. He likes stupid things, and one of the stupidest fucking things he likes is Frank.

"This is going to go fucking terrible." Frank's voice cracks in the middle and the clenched fist in Bob's insides turns into a rope around his stomach.

"Uh-huh, since when did you care about consequences?" Oh, wow. A whole sentence. Bob wonders if he's finally picked up a useful habit from someone. Say, from Gee. The ability to hurl around words of more than one syllable and some rough coherence when he's in the middle of dying of _feelings_; that can't be his.

Frank's jaw twitches, and he looks past Bob's ear. "I don't want to fuck up my band."

"Frank."

"What?"

"We already fucked up the band." It's not exactly a blinding insight. Both of them have been getting worse since this started. Frank's mutinous flailing onstage hinders his recovery and the reason he's acting like a jerk about it – Bob realises, and wishes he had the motor control right now to smack himself in the forehead – is because he's mad at Bob for something. And Bob's been preoccupied and unenthusiastic and unprofessional and they are both, both of them, _dicking MyChem in the ass_ with this stupid bullshit.

"I know. I know. I don't want to fuck it up any worse."

He can't help it; his throat's closing over and his voice is getting tighter and angrier and less sane. "_We already fucked up the fucking band, Frank_."

Bob feels like his whole body's been immersed in ice-water. The words come out of his mouth really easy, but somewhere in the back of his too-tight skull he knows that when the numbness wears off it's going to feel like someone's punched him in the chest, again and again and again.

"I know." Frank's voice is small and quiet and terrible. Fucking terrible.

"Jesus Christ." Bob takes a deep breath and leans on the nearest solid object, a sign covered in warnings in about twenty languages to let everyone know that it is not stable and should not be "relied" on. Bob feels a stab of kinship with the metal sign, but he can't stand up straight any more. It wobbles under his weight, and the worm of self-hatred digs deeper into his guts; Fat Bob knocking down road signs in China.

"Bob."

"Huh?" It's the best he can do.

Frank lunges into his personal space, and butts his face unexpectedly against Bob's bicep, and all Bob can do is wonder if this is what happens when you stop breathing.

He feels dizzy and cold and like he's underwater. Frank's forehead, hot impression on his arm, barely touches his brain at all. "Bob," Frank repeats, his mouth muffled with Bob's hoodie. People are staring. Someone has a camera. For once in Bob's life he couldn't give less of a fuck that there are about six people taking photos of him, and it's for all the worst reasons.

"What?" He manages, his mouth numb like he ate a bunch of anaesthetic thinking it was toothpaste.

"I'm sorry," Frank breathes against his hoodie. The fabric's damp with the waste of Frank's lungs. The waste of his words.

The world beneath Bob's feet isn't solid any more. That's what it is. He's going to fall, and keep falling, possibly forever, until he falls out of fucking China and back home, back to his parents' house, back to familiarity and comfort and the old, quiet ways before his, his, his, _heart_ got all snarled and entangled and started choking him to death. "You're sorry."

Frank nods his face against Bob's arm. "I'm fucking sorry. I," he better not, Bob thinks with a sudden bubble of hysteria, be wiping his fucking nose on Bob's sleeve. "I, I fucked everything up."

Bob can't exactly disagree. His arms feel like they're glue to his sides. He doesn't know if he should touch the back of Frank's head, where the hair has grown together in the beginnings of a mat without anyone noticing, or even if he _can_. "We."

Frank ignores him. "I'm sorry." Someone rings a bicycle bell at very close quarters. There's a gulping sound that could come from either of them - Bob's chest still feels like it's five sizes too small and he marvels that he's still upright - and Frank takes his face away from Bob's arm. "I like you too much to keep doing this."

"What?"

"I," Frank squints at him with suspiciously watery eyes, "like you. Too much."


End file.
